


you can’t outrun the future

by Morning66



Category: Ben 10 Series
Genre: Angst, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:47:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25173364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morning66/pseuds/Morning66
Summary: Your name is Ben Tennyson. You’re a week away from seventeen and the world is creeping in
Relationships: Rook Blonko/Ben Tennyson
Comments: 8
Kudos: 57





	you can’t outrun the future

Your name is Ben Tennyson. You’re a week away from seventeen and the world is creeping in.

It came in almost unnoticed, in small bursts, small details until it’s all there, all right in front of you, the world and the future, laid out like a red carpet, a path to follow.

You’re almost seventeen, and you should have the rest of your life ahead of you. You should still have time, time to mess up and figure out which way you want to go, which path you want to follow. You don’t though. That time has run out for you.

It started running out when you were only ten, still a child, still so so young even if you didn’t think it then. You were ten and the universe turned an hourglass upside down, and the sand started moving slowly, but surely downward, taking with it any chance at a normal life. When you were fifteen, you made a choice, a fateful choice that accelerated that sand, made it fall so quickly sometimes you wonder what’s going on in this whirlwind that is your life.

It’s not that you don’t like your life. You do. At this point you probably wouldn’t want or even understand a normal life. School, soccer, girls, food. That’s it?

It’s just that you’re almost seventeen and you know what you’ll be doing ten, twenty, thirty years from now. You know what you’ll look like in the years to come, how you’ll age and wrinkle, but gain muscle mass. You know who you’ll marry and you’ve met your son for crying out loud.

Then there’s the fact that you think you might be in love and it’s not with your future wife.

It’s not with your future wife, it’s not even with a girl. It’s with your partner, with your male best friend, which is so wrong on so many levels. It’s doomed you know, even if he felt something for you. You’ve seen the future and he’s not in it. You’re with a girl, a beautiful girl, a heroic girl, but a girl you haven’t liked since you were a kid, a girl who’s much better as a childhood crush than a future wife.

Sometimes you wish you hadn’t realized how you felt about him, realized why your heart sometimes beats a million miles an hour and you catch yourself staring. Sometimes it seemed so much easier when you were oblivious, but you’re not, not anymore, and you can’t unknow this, not for the rest of your life.

Sometimes you wonder if your adult self knows, the man you’ve seen several times, brown hair streaked with grey, facial hair stark on a chin that’s now clean shaven, muscles built on now skinny arms. He must, you think. How could he not? He must remember being you, being a teenager confused out of his mind.

So how does he deal with it? Does he just ignore it? Will he ever get over it? You wonder if he ever lies down beside his objectively beautiful wife and wishes for a man, an alien. You wonder if he ever wishes he’d made a different choice, a braver one.

Sometimes it hits you hard in the gut like all the sucker punches you’ve ever taken that he is you. He is you and you are him, twinned together for all of eternity, the future and the past. So when you’re wondering all that, it’s not about some random person, it’s about you yourself, which stops you in your tracks.

You don’t know what to do with this all, not yet, maybe not ever. Of course you don’t, you’re still a kid, not even seventeen yet. So, you paste a smile on your face, a trick you learned ages ago, because that’s how you’re supposed to be, cheerful and cocky and immature. 

“Dude, lets get smoothies!” You say to your best friend, to your partner, to the guy you might be in love with.

So you do, so you sip down the cool, sweet liquid and focus only on that because everything else is too hard, too big, too scary.


End file.
